Go Quai

Official Golang implementation of the Quai protocol.

Building the source

For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions.

Building quai requires both a Go (version 1.14 or later) and a C compiler. You can install them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run

make quai

or, to build the full suite of utilities:

make all

Executables

The go-quai project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd directory.

Command	Description
quai	Our main Quai CLI client. It is the entry point into the Quai network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default), archive node (retaining all historical state) or a light node (retrieving data live). It can be used by other processes as a gateway into the Quai network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. quai --help and the CLI page for command line options.
clef	Stand-alone signing tool, which can be used as a backend signer for quai.
devp2p	Utilities to interact with nodes on the networking layer, without running a full blockchain.
abigen	Source code generator to convert Quai contract definitions into easy to use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain Quai contract ABIs with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However, it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our Native DApps page for details.
bootnode	Stripped down version of our Quai client implementation that only takes part in the network node discovery protocol, but does not run any of the higher level application protocols. It can be used as a lightweight bootstrap node to aid in finding peers in private networks.
evm	Developer utility version of the EVM (Quai Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. evm --code 60ff60ff --debug run).
rlpdump	Developer utility tool to convert binary RLP (Recursive Length Prefix) dumps (data encoding used by the Quai protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user-friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263).
puppeth	a CLI wizard that aids in creating a new Quai network.

Running quai

Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here (please consult our CLI Wiki page), but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly on how you can run your own quai instance.

Full node on the main Quai Network

In order to initialize a full node on the Quai Network, run the following commands. This will spin up a node running all 13 contexts in the background via nohup.

$ make go-quai
$ make run-full-node

These commands will:

• Start quai in full sync mode for all 13 contexts across Prime, Region, and Zone.
• Put the processes in the background using nohup.
• Allow discoverable endpoints for miners and other WS / HTTP connections.

To stop Quai Network, run the following:

$ make stop

Full node on the Rinkeby test network

Go Quai also supports connecting to the older proof-of-authority based test network called Rinkeby which is operated by members of the community.

$ quai --rinkeby console

Note: Older quai configurations store the Ropsten database in the testnet subdirectory.

Docker quick start

One of the quickest ways to get Quai up and running on your machine is by using Docker:

docker run -d --name quai-node -v /Users/alice/quai:/root \
           -p 8545:8545 -p 30303:30303 \
           quai/client-go

This will start quai in fast-sync mode with a DB memory allowance of 1GB just as the above command does. It will also create a persistent volume in your home directory for saving your blockchain as well as map the default ports. There is also an alpine tag available for a slim version of the image.

Do not forget --http.addr 0.0.0.0, if you want to access RPC from other containers and/or hosts. By default, quai binds to the local interface and RPC endpoints is not accessible from the outside.

Programmatically interfacing quai nodes

As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with quai and the Quai network via your own programs and not manually through the console. To aid this, quai has built-in support for a JSON-RPC based APIs (standard APIs and quai specific APIs). These can be exposed via HTTP, WebSockets and IPC (UNIX sockets on UNIX based platforms, and named pipes on Windows).

The IPC interface is enabled by default and exposes all the APIs supported by quai, whereas the HTTP and WS interfaces need to manually be enabled and only expose a subset of APIs due to security reasons. These can be turned on/off and configured as you'd expect.

HTTP based JSON-RPC API options:

• --http Enable the HTTP-RPC server
• --http.addr HTTP-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)
• --http.port HTTP-RPC server listening port (default: 8545)
• --http.api API's offered over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)
• --http.corsdomain Comma separated list of domains from which to accept cross origin requests (browser enforced)
• --ws Enable the WS-RPC server
• --ws.addr WS-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)
• --ws.port WS-RPC server listening port (default: 8546)
• --ws.api API's offered over the WS-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)
• --ws.origins Origins from which to accept websockets requests
• --ipcdisable Disable the IPC-RPC server
• --ipcapi API's offered over the IPC-RPC interface (default: admin,debug,eth,miner,net,personal,shh,txpool,web3)
• --ipcpath Filename for IPC socket/pipe within the datadir (explicit paths escape it)

You'll need to use your own programming environments' capabilities (libraries, tools, etc) to connect via HTTP, WS or IPC to a quai node configured with the above flags and you'll need to speak JSON-RPC on all transports. You can reuse the same connection for multiple requests!

Note: Please understand the security implications of opening up an HTTP/WS based transport before doing so! Hackers on the internet are actively trying to subvert Quai nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running web servers, so malicious web pages could try to subvert locally available APIs!

Creating A Bootnode

To keep a set discoverable key utilize the bootnode functionality.

$ bootnode --genkey=boot.key
$ bootnode --nodekey=boot.key

With the bootnode online, it will display an enode URL that other nodes can use to connect to it and exchange peer information. Make sure to replace the displayed IP address information (most probably [::]) with your externally accessible IP to get the actual enode URL.

Note: You could also use a full-fledged quai node as a bootnode, but it's the less recommended way.

Contribution

Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!

If you'd like to contribute to go-quai, please fork, fix, commit and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base. If you wish to submit more complex changes though, please check up with the core devs first on our Discord Server to ensure those changes are in line with the general philosophy of the project and/or get some early feedback which can make both your efforts much lighter as well as our review and merge procedures quick and simple.

Please make sure your contributions adhere to our coding guidelines:

• Code must adhere to the official Go formatting guidelines (i.e. uses gofmt).
• Code must be documented adhering to the official Go commentary guidelines.
• Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the master branch.
• Commit messages should be prefixed with the package(s) they modify.
  • E.g. "eth, rpc: make trace configs optional"

Please see the Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies, and testing procedures.

License

The go-quai library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.

The go-quai binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING file.